by Doug Walton, PhD ~ June 1, 2008
I take a lot of notes, apparently even at other people’s commencement addresses. Back in 2003, my wife graduated from San Jose State University, and a well-known local real estate developer named Barry Swenson gave the commencement address. He offered the graduating class nine guidelines for going on to successful careers. I was so impressed with his guidelines that I wrote them in my palm pilot, only to discover them again earlier today.
At any rate, as we’ve reached the graduation season, and this advice is probably applicable for anyone at any stage of life, I recount, in my own words, how I remember Mr. Swenson’s pithy advice.
- Use leverage. You don’t hear this one all the time, but, as I recall, Mr. Swenson was advocating the use of loans on appreciating assets like real estate to build wealth.
- Study. Keep learning and keep educating yourself.
- Measure. Keep track of important things. Measure your progress. We only manage the things that we measure.
- Save. Be judicious about what you spend your money on. Try to save it starting at an early age.
- Invest. Not only save your money, but invest it wisely.
- Timing. Be conscious of timing. There are right times and wrong times to do things.
- Join clubs. Network with others. Build good friends and get involved with worthwhile projects, even if they are not all profit seeking.
- Marry happy. Who you marry is one of the most important decisions of your life. Choose wisely.
- Depend on yourself. Don’t expect others to do everything for you. Depend on yourself and take responsibility for your own life.
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by Doug Walton, PhD ~ February 25, 2008
Military metaphors are normally frowned upon in the organizational change world. Instead, organism metaphors and words like empowerment, collaboration, and partnership are preferred. But a friend of mine recently brought to my attention the Maneuver Warfare Handbook by William S. Lind. Although it is primarily a book about military tactics and operations, this book also has some interesting ideas for organizational change practitioners.
Much of Lind’s book is built on a fundamental insight drawn from the discoveries of a scholar of arial combat named Colonel Boyd. Boyd researched numerous reports of dogfights during the Korean War and found that U.S. pilots were able regularly dominante North Korean pilots despite the fact that the North Korean’s MIG aircraft had far superior performance to the American’s F86. The advantage the Americans had was twofold: Not only could they see out of the cockpit better, they could change flight modes faster. This enabled them to adapt more quickly to the enemy.
According to Mr. Lind, “Conflict can be seen as time-competitive observation-orientation -decision-action cycles,” or OODA loops. These loops depict the ability of combatants to identify the changed situation and to switch to a new tactic quickly. The successive adaptations create an increasing advantage, until the opponent is unable to keep up and is subsequently overwhelemed.
In the domain of organizational change, the “defenses” that we encounter are largely cognitive, but we do know that the “frontal assault” of invariant mandates from management are largely ineffective. Instead, we have to design changes that will will provide incentives for the new behaviors. Then, we have to gather feedback as the change is rolled out and quickly adjust as we learn the countours and texture of any resistance to the change. How quickly the change team can learn and adjust to ensure that the change effort offers a truly better and more effective way or working will be a critical factor to success.
Of course, resistance also adjusts to the change effort. Thus, there can be no fixed schemes, no formulas or patterns. As soon as one method is deployed, the organization will also adapt to it, seeking to maintain the status quo. Each situation is unique, requiring a change design specifically attuned to the specific situation.
These days, learning is often considered essential for competing in the market. Since at least Nonaka and Takeuchi’s The Knowledge Creating Company was published in 1991, it has been often asserted “learning is the only remaining source of competitive advantage in the modern, globalizing knowledge economy.” The metaphor of maneuver warfare described by Lind suggests that it is not so much gathering knowledge as the ability to rapidly adapt that creates the advantage. Both organizations and change practitioners must quickly read the conditions, get oriented to them, and make new decision to act.
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by Doug Walton, PhD ~ February 10, 2008
One of the great things about blogs is that they can bring many people into the conversation. When I first encountered blogs a few years ago, I thought “What good are these? So many people talking about nothing.” But that is a misconception of the utility of the blog. Although there are many fine blogs that rival the most professional news organizations, the majority of blogs serve a different societal benefit—which is to enable more voices to be heard in the public sphere, whether or not those voices are “professional” or “objective.”
For many years, the International Systems Institute held and annual conference in Northern California, the Asilomar Conversation Conference, where practitioners spent five days in deep dialogue on various topics. Sitting around wood fire, or walking along the Pacific Ocean, we discussed a wide range of social change topics. Sometimes the conversation meandered. Sometimes it became divisive. People got frustrated and occasionally there was anger. But, most of the time, we got to know each other well and learned. Very often, there would be in a moment in the conversation where the struggle to understand each other would coalesce into a powerful group insight. We used to call it the group transformative moment.
This group transformative moment seemed to be a group Aha! moment that disrupted previous conceptions, replacing them with a new mental model. In a sense, this learning was a sort of personal growth, where one’s outlook on the world was shifted. Moreover, those who experienced it felt a connection to each other aftward, for years afteward.
We found, during those conversations, that reaching a better outcome, both in terms of the quality and productivity of the work done, had a lot to do with the conversational process, or dialogue. Of course face-to-face dialogue has its own unique aspects that change how people communicate with each other and what non verbal signals are used in that communication. However, the increasing pervasiveness of video, audio, and text communication introduces an arena that may also benefit from a dialogic approach, albeit one that is adapted to the particular features of technology mediated communication.
Clearly, there is a shift away from a condition where a relatively few voices (ie., major television and radio networks) engage in one-way, broadcast communications. Now, almost anybody with a little bit of technology can “speak.” The problem we have now is that everybody is speaking— there is a cacaphony of voices all communicating at once. Still, as bloggers and others interact, posting and linking to each other, they are engaging in an online form of dialogue. Not only is information being created, but this communication is an interactive process that creates knowledge among the comunity of dialogers. How much insight and knowledge is captured depends on the quality of dialogue that occurs, so, for a truly high quality, technology mediated dialogue in the public cybersphere, we have to continue to encourage the appropriate equivalent of dialogue.
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